RADV Vulkan Driver Enables EXT_shader_object By Default With Mesa 24.1

[Shtirlic]

On some implementations, there is no downside. On these implementations, unless your application calls every state setter before every draw, shader objects outperform pipelines on the CPU and perform no worse than pipelines on the GPU. Unlocking the full potential of these implementations has been one of the biggest motivating factors driving the development of this extension.

Interesting that Steam Deck is CPU limited and this could help.

[bearoso]

Interesting that Steam Deck is CPU limited and this could help.

I'm not sure the AMD architectures will have many performance benefits with this. I've been following along during the implementation, and a lot of stuff had to be refactored for this to work.

On the other hand, things like the Unreal Engine 4 desperately didn't want to reduce their number of shader permutations, so this could help if they added it. But, from most unreal-based games I see, DX12, not Vulkan, is the sole API target, and performance is generally lackluster even on native Windows.

[smitty3268]

In case anyone was wondering, the answer is in fact, NOT in the article. Maybe clicking through links you can find the answer, but that's not in the article.

From the article:

"This has been a long and painful extension to implement but finally RADV has support for it on all supported generations."

radv supports both rdna2 and rdna3. Plus several other older generations.

[pharmasolin]

From the article:


radv supports both rdna2 and rdna3. Plus several other older generations.

So that's not clear from the article itself, as there weren't an explicit list of card generations/microarchitectures

[aviallon]

So that's not clear from the article itself, as there weren't an explicit list of card generations/microarchitectures

I guess that since most readers (including me) already know about RADV, they think this is an evidence.

[smitty3268]

So that's not clear from the article itself, as there weren't an explicit list of card generations/microarchitectures

I feel like you knew rdna 2 cards used radv. Otherwise why even ask the question under this article? Would you have really asked if it supported rdna2 if this article was about anv or nvk adding support?

I suppose I can see someone maybe reading that as saying any hardware that supports a feature, rather than any hardware the driver supports. Although it's just software in this case so i don't think the hardware really matters much.

[ResponseWriter]

So that's not clear from the article itself, as there weren't an explicit list of card generations/microarchitectures

That I'll grant you, but a quick duckduckgo for 'radv' gets me the first page of documentation which states on the first line:

RADV is a Vulkan driver for AMD GCN/RDNA GPUs.

[Triang3l]

All supported gpus, even ancient GCN1

And in fact the pre-Vega generations got support for it in RADV the earliest because it's more straightforward to implement it on top of the legacy geometry pipeline where hardware geometry processing shader stages are separate just like in Vulkan itself rather than merged 🙃